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Dodging bullets in 'Terrortown'

In the 1970s, the South Side of Chicago was a black, middle-class dream. Today, a writer returns to her roots and finds mayhem — and shards of hope

The murder rate is dropping in Chicago, but some blocks in the South Side remain no-go areas for most people. Here, a person is moved to an ambulance after four people were shot in the South Side on Nov. 6, 2013. (Brian Jackson / Chicago Tribune/MCT)

The childhood home of Washington Post writer Lonnae O’Neal Parker is just steps from Jackie Robinson Park in the Washington Heights neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. The fragility of life on the South Side is reflected in what have become everyday routines involving prayer vigils for young murder victims. (JON LOWENSTEIN/ NOOR / The Washington Post)

Families and supporters of the Jackie Robinson West Little League gather for a victory parade at Jackie Robinson Park on Aug. 27 in Chicago's Washington Heights neighborhood, part of the troubled South Side. (JON LOWENSTEIN/ NOOR / The Washington Post)

By Lonnae O’Neal ParkerThe Washington Post

Sun., Sept. 28, 2014

CHICAGO—Heading south on Halsted, I told my friend Tom to make the right onto 106th, even though my landmarks, the Century Foods and Church’s Chicken, were long gone. I’d been back to visit my old neighbourhood just a half-dozen times since 1977, but the tree-lined streets and neat rows of one-storey brick homes, part of Chicago’s “bungalow belt,” looked untouched by time.

We neared my old house, and I felt giddy. When President-elect Barack Obama once visited The Washington Post newsroom and it was my turn to shake his hand, I blurted out that I was from the South Side.

“South Side!” Obama shouted-out in response, because it’s a place you claim with percussion.

We turned onto Morgan and began to crawl the block. A layer of well-cut grass covered the empty lot next to the house my family left when I was nearly 10. Tattered blinds hung in the picture window, and the downspout was unhinged. The big maple in front was gone. It was late afternoon, and half a dozen young men were hanging out in the street.

Headlines out of Chicago had grown particularly violent over the years. More than 500 people were slain in 2012, the most of any U.S. city, and Chicago has been in the top three since 1985. But it’s a city of millions, and statistics felt unconnected to the Chicago I knew.

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The “Wild Hunneds,” Tom’s college friend Duane had called it when we told him where we were going, but I didn’t know what he was talking about. I’d fantasized about buying back my house as a vacation getaway.

I wanted to get out and walk. Tom, who is also from the South Side and now lives in Virginia, vetoed the idea. He noticed a couple of the young men were drinking. They smiled and waved at me as we drove past. I waved back. We drove around the block and decided to park at Mount Vernon Park, now called Jackie Robinson Park, where a group of Little Leaguers were chasing fly balls.

Tom went to watch the boys practice. Without telling him, I walked back toward my old house. The playground across the street, newly remodelled but not yet reopened, was surrounded by tarp and warning signs to keep out. A young man walked out from the nearby field house, and I peppered him with questions about the park and school.

For a moment, I stood frozen. It was July 2, so I thought they were firecrackers. “Those aren’t firecrackers,” the man said. He started running into the field house, and I ran after him, high-heeled shoes cutting into my feet. Rounding the corner, I saw Tom looking for me.

“C’mon! C’mon!” he urged. We jumped in the car and headed back toward Halsted and the highway as the afternoon filled with sirens and flashing lights.

That Fourth of July weekend, from Thursday to Sunday, saw 82 people shot in Chicago, 16 of them killed. That wasn’t including the young man who was shot and injured that Wednesday as I was standing in the park.

I couldn’t stop thinking about my old neighbourhood. I decided to go back, to try to understand what had happened to the South Side I had known.

Perhaps a third of the kids in my sister Lisa’s kindergarten class picture were white. By the time I was in kindergarten four years later, in 1973, there wasn’t a single one. In my world, white didn’t even really come in kids. It came in teachers only.

I grew up in racially turbulent times, but the homogeny of my daily life featured few signs of it. Chicago is a city of 77 officially designated neighbourhoods, and the Washington Heights neighbourhood, where I lived, was solidly middle class. By 1970, it was 75 per cent black. It’s been between 98 and 99 per cent black since 1980. “As African Americans move in and whites move out, it remains very middle class,” says Chicago historian James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association.

My father, a police officer, and mother, a schoolteacher, bought our three-bedroom house in 1968. They wanted a starter home for their young family and found it right across the street from Mount Vernon Elementary School and park. I liked to sit at the big picture window in front of the house and watch people scatter when it rained.

There is a term in winemaking called terroir. Loosely translated, it means the grapes taste like the dirt where they were grown. I was grown in South Side soil and cocooned in the contours and rhythms of black life. Emerald grass, backyard barbecues and Earth, Wind and Fire on AM 1390. Women who smoked cigarettes hands-free and teenage boys who sat on porch steps between the knees of young girls who braided their Afros into cornrows. I learned to speak to everybody on the South Side, and when I think to myself, the words come to me in South Side dialect.

While the neighbourhood remained middle class, wealth is often more important, Grossman says, and “white people between World War II and the housing crash in 2007 built up their wealth through real estate.” My parents sold their house in 1977 for $26,500. According to the Cook County Assessor’s Office, it’s now worth $105,000 — virtually unchanged in 37 years after adjusting for inflation. Go to a comparable white neighbourhood “on the Northwest side, or better yet in the suburbs, and compare its value for those dates and you’ll see a completely different trajectory,” he suggested.

Blacks were more reliant on public-sector jobs, many of which were cut beginning in the 1980s. That damaged the black middle class, as did the decline of unionized private-sector jobs, which had been a basis of black stability. Neighbourhoods like Washington Heights began to lose ground, and lose people — from population highs of more than 36,000 in 1970 and 1980 to just 26,493 in 2010.

Many of them, like my parents, among the most able, were the ones who left. We moved to the Southwest suburb of Hazel Crest, an area that was majority white but grappling with racial change — sometimes through invites for sleepovers, and sometimes by calling us niggers, or calling the city “Chicongo.” I spent formative junior high and high school years in the suburbs, but the trees were never as impressive, the community never as cohesive, or perhaps it’s just that I never felt as special, with my window on the world, as I had on the South Side.

Segregation and income and wealth disparities aren’t a new story in Chicago, but they softened the ground, making even solidly established neighbourhoods vulnerable to social ills such as drugs and crime.

And vulnerable, especially, to the widespread disruption that was just around the corner.

The neighbours a few doors down would sometimes argue, and the mothers had to shoo all the kids inside because the husband would start shooting into the air.

I was sitting on the porch one day when boys across the street doused a cat with lighter fluid, then threw a match. My sister and I kept screaming as the fireball streaked the playground. My parents went to confront the boys. My father took his gun. “You’d do this to an animal, you’d do it to a person,” my mother said to them. Then my father shot the cat dead.

When I was growing up, it seemed like black folks all lived on the same striving pages, but there were always those who violated our sense of community and the good things we wanted to believe about ourselves. It took hypervigilance to keep the neighbourhood in balance. When the vigilant grownups moved, became old or died, so did our neighbourhoods.

The walls inside the South Side Help Center feature posters of Barack Obama, awards and mementos from its 27 years of community outreach. Vanessa Smith, the executive director, attended Mount Vernon, as did her late sister, Valerie, one of my best friends. Valerie had also worked at the centre founded by their mother, Betty Smith.

“A lot has changed,” Vanessa said. There’s “a lot of gun violence. A lot of shootings.” People “who were there when my mother first moved in are still there, but they’re aging. The newer neighbours have kids who are loud and rowdy.” In 2000, the Chicago Housing Authority began its 10-year “Plan for Transformation” to do away with its infamous projects and relocate the 25,000 households who lived in them. The net effect, according to everyone you talk to, was to take centralized communities of poverty and crime, but also network and kinship, and scatter them throughout established South Side and West Side neighbourhoods.

“You had all these individuals who had a sense of community in the projects,” said Smith. “The housing authority assumed the neighbours would help them acclimate to a new environment,” but that didn’t happen. “The neighbours were busy working. They didn’t deal with these individuals, or try to get them to be part of the community. The scattering compounded with the downturn of the economy led to illegal activity.”

You could forget that Chicago has had a reputation for violence since the gangster days of Al Capone. More than 600 people a year were murdered every year during rampant drug and street-gang violence of the 1980s and 1990s, and several years saw more than 900 homicides. But according to the Chicago Police Department, 2013 featured declines in every major category of crime, including the fewest murders since 1965.

Robert Tracy, chief of the Chicago Police Department’s Office of Crime Control Strategies, and Evelyn Diaz, commissioner of the Department of Family and Support Services, say attention should be paid to those reductions.

“The point is, the crime is not random,” Diaz said. The police use “data in innovative ways to predict where the violence outbreaks are significantly most likely to occur.” There’s been more investment in troubled communities; mentoring and summer jobs programs, a record 22,000 this year.

But Tracy acknowledged a perception gap with residents. “If there were five murders in your neighbourhood last year and three this year, you don’t feel 40 per cent safer.”

On the plane to Chicago, Marcus Chatman, 26, was on his way home from the BET Awards in Los Angeles. He told me how his twin brother — younger by a minute — was shot and killed outside a house party in 2010. “Just wrong time, wrong place stuff you can’t control,” he said. Chatman served time for drugs and passing bad cheques, but he’d “liked messin’ with fabrics” in high school.

He told me about the apparel line he started — “No Talking” — in honour of his slain brother and that the Chicago Fox affiliate had done a story about the brothers. He’d missed a couple of flights earlier. “I ain’t in no rush to get back to this war zone,” he said. I told him about my old neighbourhood, where someone had been shot, and he nodded. “The Wild Hunneds,” he said.

He explained Chicago street violence: When “shorties” step outside, they’re going to get “touched,” Chatman said. “These kids, they got ‘opps’ — opposition.” That’s what kids from one neighbourhood call kids from another. They get revved up listening to Chief Keef, he said, referencing one of a generation of young Chicago rappers who use a signature style — lyrical nihilism over menacing beats — to rap about gunplay. “They just fallin’ in line. Just dyin’ trying to keep up.”

Chatman started No Talking because “I don’t appreciate how that situation happened with my brother and ain’t nobody speak on it,” he said. “To be honest, I need to speak this out. It gives me a fierce inside. Like, why ain’t nobody saying nothing after all these years?

“This was tragedy. This was destruction.”

Later, inside the South Side Help Center, I told this story to Turron Clayton Sr., a youth mentoring co-ordinator, who has worked with the centre since 1992. “I told Chatman he needed to talk to somebody,” I said to Clayton.

“He did talk to somebody,” Clayton said. “He talked to you.” You have to talk it out, “or you’re going to fight it out.” Clayton said closing the projects created its own problems, but he pointed to other, long-standing declines: resources, services, leadership and community responsibility — not just in the black neighbourhoods, but citywide.

Even still, in some of the most violent areas, “there are beautiful, educated black families who keep their neighbourhoods,” Clayton said. “You cut around the corner, you’ve got a block club, but you go two blocks, that’s disarray, that’s chaos.”

In the back room, Felicia Simpson runs programs for young people, most from nearby high schools that have struggled with rivalries and violence. There’s so much threat around them, they’ve become desensitized, Simpson said.

Darrius Barron and Alexandria “AJ” Smith, both 21, have been coming to the centre since they were children. Smith, a student at Olive-Harvey College who wants to be an elementary school teacher, grew up in the house behind my old house. “Now you can’t really go past a certain block,” Smith said. “Now everybody is into it with everybody.” Smith and Barron’s conversation about their aspirations and lives full of age-appropriate challenges is constantly sprinkled with calculations about risk and safety.

“I was never the type to associate with gangs,” said Barron, who works at Planet Fitness and wants to get into broadcast journalism. “I always watched cartoons and after-school specials.” It didn’t keep him safe.

As a freshman, “I’m just trying to get to the bus stop. I don’t know anybody and they don’t know me.” The first day of his second week of school, “I got robbed,” Barron said. “At gunpoint. I’m terrified. I’m 14. My first memory of high school is getting robbed. How would that make you feel?”

The two recounted the Chicago neighbourhood nicknames they’ve heard: Terrortown, Murderfield and of course the broad swath of far South Side blocks that stretch roughly from 100th to the city limits at 138th. When the projects came down, people couldn’t afford “to live in those gentrifying areas,” said Barron. “Where did they go? To the Hunneds.”

But neither has given up on Chicago. All cities have problems, they say. “This is where my morals were learned to me, and me and my brothers created a bond,” said Barron. He wants to own the house where he now lives.

Smith agreed. “I still think where I was at is still a good neighbourhood.”

My last day on the South Side, I headed for my old school, Mount Vernon Elementary. Principal Dawn Scarlett met me at the door and showed me around. I remembered the gym where Cheryl Franklin taught me the words to “I Wish” by Stevie Wonder; I remembered the cavernous auditorium where we watched all those science tutorials with the all-white faces.

It took a lot of doing, “but I’ve got good kids now. We got an award for low suspensions last year,” Scarlett said. She pointed to the new lockers and fresh paint. “Don’t write this as a heartbreak,” she urged. “Like there’s nothing left and there’s no signs of hope. The kids here are still good kids.” Mount Vernon renovated and expanded its park, she pointed out. “People still take pride in this neighbourhood.”

As I walked away, I watched a group of young girls practising their dance routine, and I remembered when I was a little girl standing in the same spot, singing a bluesy version of “Little Sally Walker” with my friends. “Put’cha hands on your hips, and let your backbone slip.”

“I grew up right there,” I told them. I started to walk away, and one little sparkplug of a girl came running after me.

“Excuse me, but do you want to see our dance?” she asked. She reminded me of all the little South Side girls I had ever known, and the one I had once been. A sweetness that could change the world.

“I would love to see your dance,” I said and hovered as they gyrated to the Iggy Azalea song: “I’m so fancy.”

A police car raced down 107th.

Later, I was in front of my old house again. About a dozen young men were smoking in the fenced-off, still-closed playground. A few metres away, a group of parents watched the 11-year-old Jackie Robinson West Little League all-star team. I walked over to the moms; they’d been keeping a wary eye on the young guys and deliberately parked their lawn chairs with a huge tree between them. Other than that, they were enjoying the game, they said. The lights were starting to come up in the park.

I started for my car, and for the first time saw the door open at my old house. I introduced myself to the women who lived there and described the house in detail; the bedrooms and built-in bookshelves. I showed her the patio that still had the faintest traces of my mother’s handwriting: “Betty Lou and Lonnie, 1969.”

Edwana Stitt and her family have been renting the house since 2008. “The neighbourhood has its good days and its bad days,” Stitt said. Somebody got shot in front of the park right across the street, she told me.

“I know. I heard it,” I said. I described the block when I lived there, and she said it sounded like her mother’s neighbourhood on 84th and Carpenter, where everybody knew everybody, their kids and their grandkids. But not Morgan. She didn’t really know anybody else.

She went inside, and I got in my car and crawled the block. I was ready to come home. I rounded 106th, and a group of young men were walking in the street. They were laughing, and I wondered where they were headed and what was in store for them. They made an exaggerated show of looking in my car. They smiled and waved at me as I passed.

I smiled and waved back, and kept driving.

By the numbers

21

Homicdes per 100,000 Chicago residents in 2003

15

Homicides per 100,000 residents in 2013

29%

Drop in the murder rate over that decade

46%

Drop in New York's homicide rate in the same period

50%

Comparable drop in the Los Angeles murder rate

4

Homicides per 100,000 residents in New York in 2013

10

People in Chicago who died violently in 2013 but whose cases were reclassified so they didn't count as murders, according to a Chicago Magazine investigation

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